Pages

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Color Sorting Tray (Preschool Activity)

Olivia and I are all about loving the colors around us.
Come play with us and learn how to make your own fun color sorting tray!

Yo. Ready to get some color into your life? Let's do it.

This activity builds the following skills:

hand-eye coordination

color recognition

sorting

focus/concentration

For this activity you'll need:

A tray with 6 compartments and 1 middle compartments. (Or you could use several bowls and have one bowl for each color and one big bowl to store everything in.)

Cards with the name of each color*

Lots of little things of each color

*The cards we used are some that I made a while ago by printing off and laminating these great color coded labels (free printable) from Yellow Mums. I printed off a double set for us so we could use them for matching activities too. I also punched a hole in the corner of all the cards because I store them on a metal binder ring.

Sadly, I just checked and the free printable says it's gone private. I assume that's an issue with Scribd (the site you download the printable through) and not Yellow Mums, but I'm not sure how soon the printable will be available again. Just FYI, I guess. UPDATE: It's fixed! Thanks Lauralee!

Usually when I prepare preschool activities like this, I get everything ready ahead of time and pick out all the little items myself. This helps keep the inevitable mess under control and makes the preparation process go a lot quicker.

But this time I decided to incorporate the preparation of the activity into the activity itself. So here's how Olivia and I did this activity together.

First, I got our little color cards and put one card in each compartment. (The middle compartment stays empty at first.)

Then I got our the basket with all of our little manipulatives. I store this basket in the back and usually Olivia is not allowed to get into it. (Hello, that would be such a mess.) But today I brought it out and opened up the bags with all the little items inside. I also grabbed our tangram puzzle set so we could use a few of the pieces from that.

Then I pointed to the RED card and asked Olivia what color it was. "Red." Great job! Then we looked in each of the bags of goodies and I asked her if she saw anything red. If she did, she pulled one out and put it in the RED compartment.

We did this for each color. Olivia loved going on her little color hunt and pulling out all of the little items.

I asked Olivia to sit by her finished tray so I could take a picture. This is what I got. Funny girl.

Then when she had finished finding all of the colorful items and sorting them correctly, she put all of the items away in the middle compartment.

For the sake of maintaining some order, I asked her to start with the red items and work her way around in rainbow order.

And that's it! Fun and simple!

Try changing this activity by:

using items that are all the same (i.e. all pom poms, all marbles, all buttons, etc.)

setting up the tray ahead of time and starting with all of the mixed items in the center compartment

using different colors

taking out the cards and having them just sort the items (i.e. when they find the first red item, they put it in a compartment and that becomes the red compartment rather than having each compartment pre-labeled)